Month: January 2018

The time of year I remember most distinctly from my childhood was those strange weeks when the nights drew in. Halloween, Bonfire Night…the cheap masks at the shop at the end of the twitchel (because that’s what they were called in North Nottinghamshire), the divine aroma of potatoes being charred on the backyard fire which, these days, would have the council ‘round in a flash. Those cold, dark evenings carried their own gothic magic as a child. One could quite easily imagine Spring-Heeled Jack bounding from the council estate roofs and the bizarrely-gnarled trees in the woods actually being science fiction organisms. Renowned as one of the most haunted villages in England, there was always a spectral threat on the lips of our parents, and all of this has indelibly left a quasi-Victorian gothic impression on my recollections of the early eighties.

This impression is what always returns when I hear The Fall. The oblique, rumbling production on Dragnet, the keyboard trail on Frightened, the choppy vaudeville of City Hobgoblins. And those words…like tapping into long-forgotten truths which revealed themselves in layers the more one could discern them. Listening to any Fall record was worth a dozen trips to the library and provided a far more comprehensive (albeit labyrinthine) education than one could hope to gain in those Thatcherite penal colonies we were forced to attend during the week: instant psychic Cinerama of a world made up of grotesque (ha!) goat-breeders, phantom stalkers, Disneyland beheadings and strange conjugations of literary figures. Mark E. Smith saw himself as a writer above all else, and it is indeed within those wordscapes that one is ensnared once those primitive, repetitive rhythms and snarling Northern barks have either enchanted or repelled you.

This was the Britain one would experience if one watched Coronation Street on LSD – the Barlows’ crepuscular killing sprees, Kevin Webster copulating with Jack Duckworth’s pigeons in the outhouse to produce a malformed beak/moustache hybrid, all in those lurid cathode reds and blues of early colour television, yet with shadows darker than a Castiglione monoprint. And we respond to those grotesqueries knowing full well that we – the working class with our fathers risking life and limb daily at the colliery – are the grotesque products of a perverted society. Smith took the narrative experimentation of The Velvet Underground and twisted it to his own vision, throwing in all manner of literary, cultural and political allusion along with it – the mystical autodidact Roman Totale his early prosopopoeial alter-ego emerging from the song lyrics to commandeer the sleeve notes. So within, so without.

As amusing as it may be to recall Smith’s innumerable bon mots, jibes and drunken slurs collected over the decades, it is nonetheless to miss the point – Samuel Beckett was no less the caustic wit when in his frequent cups and Jackson Pollock could just as easily clear a dinner party as Smith could a pub. Yes, I frequently return to YouTube for my regular fix of Mark’s brusque humour in interviews yet, for the proper stuff, I delve feet-first into Grotesque and Hex Enduction Hour. These albums weren’t joking. They meant every rancorous syllable. While Morrissey was regaling us with upturned bicycles and Oscar Wilde throwbacks, Smith gave us the world red in tooth and claw, only redder and toothier. And while the former produced countless soundalikes throughout the eighties, nineties and to this day, nobody has ever managed to sound like The Fall. Quite right, too.

This is a treatise on nomadology. Yet, often more than this it is a treatise on the rhizomatic influence Gilles Deleuze has had on contemporary art and – on a much wider scale – Western culture in general. It is only reasonable, then, that its structure should be nomadic in nature, fashioned as such more as a tool to illustrate this often problematic Deleuzian concept than as a homage to A Thousand Plateaus , his and Felix Guattari’s magnum opus. Ours is an age when linearity is a matter of both personal interpretation and artist’s prerogative: from meta referentiality, disruptions in a given narrative order, prosopopoeia or a more time-honoured allegory. During the course of this dissertation I shall be using many of these devices, yet the most notable will be prosopopoeia in the form of Harry Irene, a fictitious art critic who will on occasion resemble Clement Greenberg, will sometimes reflect the mannerisms of John Berger or even unashamedly ape Brian Sewell. Never affected with malice, this gestalt interpretation merely serves to reflect on the typically modernist attitude which was the hallmark of mid-Twentieth Century criticism. We can imagine pince nez, and furnish Irene with them accordingly. Yet, If Irene is a virtual gestalt of Twentieth Century art criticism, then this of little significance. Art critics have always necessarily been spectres at the feast of invention: they help to mould style by trimming away excess, adding (sometimes) rich commentary and narrative to artworks and exponentially increasing the culturally affective clout of same. Conversely, their function can also serve to stifle and stunt cultural growth. Perhaps one can say that the text can also be read as an affectionate lampooning of that profession, although one must therefore remember at all times that this would merely be subtext. A lighthearted subtext, certainly, but subtext all the same.

As an artist I have constantly been nomadic in my practice: this goes hand-in-hand with a mind which is constantly flitting from one concept to the next, considering the commonalities which unite otherwise disparate issues and allowing one sole constant throughout my body of work – myself. From themes such as father/son relationships, mental health, hauntology, Althusser’s interpellation, cinema, memory, identity and even the work of Deleuze himself, I have never remained lingering on any one topic for long, nor has the materiality of the work remained static. When a viewer once commented that my work consisted of “everything but the kitchen sink,” I briefly entertained the idea of sourcing that very item and, early on in my career when lamenting my own lack of style or idiosyncratic visual coding, a tutor responded with “you know what? It’s overrated.”

This dissertation does not seek out the specific times and places of any nomadological departures per se, and certainly the aim is not to traipse once more through Twentieth Century art history in an attempt to temporally tick the boxes which support my thesis. What it will do, however, is suggest artists whose spirit has either prompted or perpetuated nomadic art practices. Again, this is by no means a left-to-right recounting of the past as it meets the present for to do so would run counter to the very phenomena discussed. It will remain atemporal throughout, much like the indexical numbered lines of flight detailing specific instances of events which, in one way or another, are nomadic. It is important that this work be allowed to stop and start at its own pace, according to its own nature, that it reads like a Deleuzian plateau.

Chapter One: Harry Hits Out

Harry Irene, much like other similarly flamboyant modernists of the day, espoused formalism and unity as the hallmarks of “good art.” With six years’ boarding school behind him and an impeccable grasp of Latin, for a while Irene was considered the Philosopher King of art criticism. The spokes on his bicycle would resonate machine-like as the art critic weaved his way throughout the London streets from one gallery to the next. Good-natured and sympathetic to all, with the notable exception of artists. By and large, he openly despised them. His beloved Willem de Kooning set the benchmark, if one were to ask him, of painterly excellence. Robert Rauschenberg, on the other hand, he considered the scourge of the art world – if one were to ask him, Irene would lay the blame of aesthetic decline almost squarely on Rauschenberg’s shoulders, and was particularly scolding towards any artist who appeared to ally themselves with the American. In 1967 Irene wrote on Conceptual Art “the ill-deserved revival of the redundant French buffoon.” Typically dismissive of anything which eschewed the aforementioned two values of formalism and unity, Irene said this in 1962 of Öyvind Fahlström’s solo exhibition at Paris’ Galerie Daniel Cordier:

“The novelty of in-patient logic combined with a flagrant disregard for context notwithstanding, the Cordier has delivered a flat, jejune show. The painterly has been reduced to the wax crayon, and Rauschenberg apparently loves it. The exhibition brochure features the blushing artist rejoicing that there are like-minded souls in the world. All structure, such as it is, is purely virtual – blending the political with the fantastical and presenting the result in works that are only ever two steps at best above an adolescent’s boredom-breaker may appeal to the radical, but should not be encouraged if art hopes to maintain its plateau. Cartoon politics and beatnik affectations belong to the pulps, not the Cordiers.”

The plateau alluded to would be – in 1962 – one more singular and hierarchical than a plateau suggested by Deleuze and Guattari. Theirs was one of a reciprocal multitude, while Irene’s was still very much in the nature of the sermon on the mount.

In 1980, The Fall paid tribute to Harry Irene in the lyrics to How I Wrote Elastic Man:

Life should be full of strangeness
Like a rich painting

The above couplet, whether Mark E. Smith at the time realised it or not, also succinctly outlines what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari referred to as “lines of flight,” and implies by its imperative that life is only worth living if it encounters strangeness. Analogous to the becoming outlined in the two volumes which comprise Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose that it is through the encounter that consciousness and subjectivity are defined. The various and infinite forces which our universe (that non-transcendental state which the authors refer to as the plane of immanence) is governed by are always in flux, connecting and passing through other forces at random and in so doing creating new perceptions and systems of thought. “Strangeness,” then in this context should be read as an encounter (be they subjective or objective) between two disparate forces. Simply put, the subjective force of an art work upon the viewer only opens up possibilities for discourse if that art work is unfamiliar, strange or in many cases ugly, to that viewer. This makes possible and likely new ways of perception, new modes of thought and new creative possibilities (for the strangeness perceived by the viewer should, if interpreted correctly, inspire fresh creative forces which pass through the viewer-becoming-artist). These phenomena are not restricted to any cultural discipline (or, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, “captured”), but are instead multi-disciplinary in nature. In this respect, lines of flight can be traced between contemporary art, cinema, literature or – as the above lyrical example attests – music. Art is never purely a process of subjectivity: rather it is emancipatory in the sense that it opens up potentiality. Abstraction becomes a plane of immanence on which the virtual is perceived as utopian potentialities.

Among Deleuze & Guattaris’ more crucial themes – in terms of contemporary art-world parlance – is that of nomadology, which has gradually over recent years become a dominant practice. The nomadic artist will jump from materials, themes, ideas and strategies in an ostensibly random manner, whilst retaining a core constant (on the plane of consistency, staying with Deleuze) which is more often than not the artist him or herself. This text should therefore focus on nomadic practices, their origins and their implications, the central idea that art should retain a chaotic sensibility in order to remain relevant in a chaotic word. More than this, though, is the sense that while a given artist superficially seeks to create order from chaos, there is also a strong element of the opposite: to create a chaotic linguistic framework from a pre-existing order, and then to reassemble the elements taken apart into a seemingly chaotic bricolage, which is in itself deceptively ordered.

To place this phenomenon into an historical context, it is perhaps useful to go back to Post-Conceptual Art, that 1970s movement which not only reintroduced materiality to conceptual practice, it added new and emergent materials in order to expand the potentiality of same. John Baldessari is often credited with creating both Post-Conceptual practice and its taxonomic during his tenure at the California Institute of the Arts, although one could also argue that the basis for Post-Conceptualism was already put in place by the Fluxus movement. Certainly, Happenings bore all the extra-material hallmarks of Post-Conceptual art, though artists who were the product of Fluxus were already exhibiting nomadic traits as far back as the 1960s. Yet Baldessari, in 1973, was using strategies of games in his work Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (best of 36) which mirrored those of Swedish multimedia artist Öyvind Fahlström. Fahlström can be said to be a forerunner of nomadic practices.

Line of Flight #1: “Everyone is an artist,” Joseph Beuys once famously said. Rather than a trite throwaway statement, Beuys perfectly sums up the Deleuzian concept. Where nomadology and the rhizome resonate most profoundly is in the biological, rather than the linguistic (although we may reason that the two are not mutually exclusive). If everything is in a perpetual state of becoming (desire, as Deleuze would have it), then everything is subject to affect: one body affects another to varying degrees of intensity. What Beuys proposes is that the substance of art (whatever form this may take) increases the intensity of the affect. A person who spends their entire life without once putting brush to canvas, without moulding clay or taking any photographs is still an artist in the affective sense, in that their very existence will resonate with another living thing. Art, as Wittgenstein once said, is a semiotic triangle – a thing is art if it “arts,” thus affecting the receiver. Human beings, by their very linguistic nature, are artists due to communication.

Irene had already dismissed Fluxus the previous decade as “Flatus.” Having met Joseph Beuys in Germany, he had advised the artist to purchase for himself a proper pair of trousers.

Irene would later – in 1978 – reverse his opinion of Fahlström somewhat, citing the “latent and intersticial nature” of his work. In accordance with the paradigm shift brought about by Baldessari’s post-conceptual departure, Irene was but one of a number of critics who began to realise the potential of the idea as opposed to the finished work. If Fluxus began to erode the material norms of art practice, then post-conceptualism re-assembled art practice in a way which, for commentators such as Harry Irene, was perhaps too much of a shock to traditional values to at first work in the same manner as previous decades.

Rather than pertaining to actual nomadic people, nomadology is simply an illustrative tool to suggest that we may think and write without reference to hierarchical, arborescent models. Favouring the rhizomatic at all times, Deleuze and Guattari propose a means of production which is emancipated from any pre-established linguistic framework. The painter should paint without reference to other painters, the playwright (like Beckett) should write according to their own haecceity and to the fire with the Shakespearian orthodoxy.

Line of Flight #2: in 1966, Tom Phillips purchases a second-hand copy of W.H. Mallock’s obscure Victorian novel A Human Document whilst in a furniture repository with painter R.B. Kitaj. He sets himself the task of reworking every page in the book, by inking over, deleting and otherwise mutating the story into an entirely new and rhizomatic narrative interpretation. Completed in 1973 and exhibited that same year, Phillips’ A Human Document Redux, now retitled A Humament , was published in its new incarnation in 1980. Since then the novel has mutated even further, with Phillips re-working his interpretation and developing this into an opera. According to Phillips, “Once I got my prize home I found that page after randomly opened page revealed that I had stumbled upon a treasure. Darting eagerly here and there I somehow omitted to read the novel as an ordered story. Though in some sense I almost know the whole of it by heart, I have to this day never read it properly from beginning to end.” This is precisely how Deleuze and Guattari propose that the reader approach A Thousand Plateaus, ignoring the left-to-right linearity of a book in any traditional sense.

Nomadology is subject to lines of flight, and the biunivocal relations between bodies which occasion these lines of flight. The nomadic artist flags vectors and creates other lines of flight towards new vectors. Consider the work of Ken + Julia Yonetani, which “explores the interaction between humans, nature, science and the spiritual realm in the contemporary age, unearthing and visualizing hidden connections between people and their environment.” This self-assessment, courtesy of the duo’s website, already sounds nomadic yet, when we consider any collaborative venture we may conceive of two (already nomadic) vectors meeting to create a further (two-fold) nomadic vector. This vector, then, contains an exponentially greater potentiality. This phenomenon bases itself on the concept of the smooth and striated space. Striated space being hierarchical and of the state (that which can be counted and occupied in sedentary steps), whilst the smooth is rhizomatic, multitudinous and decidedly more democratic.

Chapter Two: In Which Style is Forsaken in Favour of a Globalised Non-System of Signs

Can art be traced on a map with any degree of exactitude? By this, we may imagine a vast chart which historically positions movements, artists, themes and media, imagining further that these can be connected according to commonalities: which themes link two otherwise seemingly disparate art practices? Certainly, we can draw inferences from social and political issues, in that prevalent societal factors in the 1950s, for instance, can still be attributed to the contemporary work – societal factors are never purely tied to one particular epoch.

Line of Flight #3: 2013. Raqs Media Collective bring their multimedia project The Last International to New York’s Performa 13 biennial. From the germ of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ idea to move the Council General of the First International Working Men’s Association to New York City in 1872, the exhibition develops into “a deep sea dive, head-first, into the future, and into infinity” which “stages debates, a wine-drinking symposium on time, involves a runaway rhinoceros, a time travelling bicycle, a conversation between a yaksha and a yakshi, as it turns mathematics and botany into poetry and creates a ruckus out of concepts, questions, symbols and totems.” Raqs transcend linear time and geographical space, imagining temporalities and realms which might be considered hauntological. Jacques Derrida postulated that Marxism would haunt Western society from beyond the grave in an omnipresent, miasmic manner neither alive nor dead. Raqs do not indulge in prosaic nostalgia: they re-imagine the past as a precursor to a present that never was.

Beyond that which is immediate in art, past issues of form, colour and content, lies a subtle, reflexive mechanism. Shadows present themselves in the varying distances between the machinic apparatuses of the work and the eye; the eye and the brain. These shadows are interpreted in tandem with the more tangible, visual stimuli to make up a process of affect (the ability to affect and be affected) which may or may not immediately be perceived by the subject. Often, the encounter is the essence of art, a trend which has persisted throughout the latter half of the Twentieth-Century and has found its own milieu in Relational Aesthetics (for what else could we term this affective discourse if not “relational”?). Relational Aesthetics is now a central fixture of an art market which has long celebrated the rhizomatic, the nomadic and the affective yet can more throroughly be traced back to Fluxus.

We take the view that Deleuze and Guattari’s prodigious invention of concepts should be understood as an attempt to create a new set of coordinates for thinking that can and should be modified to suit new circumstances and new questions.

Art history has proven time and again that political and social entropy leads to multiple points of departure in art practice orthodoxy: Dada owes its inception to the First World War, the decidedly nomadic catalogue of Ilya Kabakov is a by-product of Social Realism. It is perhaps churlish to expect an artist’s milieu to remain the same in a world in a constant state of flux. In an age of rebranding, rebooting, re-shuffling and profound uncertainty, art which rigidly adheres to an aesthetic model is now more often than not seen as a trifle old hat.

We can observe here that nomadology had already been a practice and attitude within the art world long before Deleuze and Guattari had coined the term, and had indicated a shift towards the virtual and latent which has since become standard vernacular. Artists, like writers, are involuntary narcissists. Both fabricate worlds in which said artist’s ego has the dominant ideology, and both dictate life and death according to their whims. Every writer and every artist is God to their individual micro-disciplinary practice, a practice which we can perceive as a world, or sphere. If we were to create a model of the seemingly endless practices being engaged at any one time, we would see an actual world filled with these spheres orbiting one another, feeding off of a shared, reciprocal energy. To begin any kind of creative endeavour is to feed from and absorb the energies flowing from these multiplicitous bodies, and to negotiate the regulations governing these. The artist borrows and re-conditions: nothing is purely genius. In this sense art is always a collaborative process, allowing multiple voices to be heard to varying degrees of intensity. This process has previously been referred to as a constellation, though art practice in the 21st Century has become a thing decidedly more immanent, allowing literal connections, juxtapositions and collaborations to occur. The artist, we can argue, who does not engage culturally, socially or creatively with the spheres in orbit around them must either be an artist of the most profound genius, or no artist at all. We may also think of the artist as the zeitgeist of their particular field, in that an artist cannot help but be a vector in a specific chain of semiotic connections starting with obsessions and inspirations, contemporary osmosis and going on to include those works which the artist has necessarily inspired. Naturally, the number of “inspirational” vectors both before and after the artist’s own vector can be nigh-on infinite, and each prone to mutation – for the flow of creative energy goes backwards as well as forwards. We retrospectively attribute aspects culled from other sources to a piece of work after we have encountered the second pieces of work, altering and mutating the meanings and semiotic representations to both primary and secondary sources. Indeed, in this respect are there any longer primary or secondary pieces of work? The present is irreducible to any singularity. This is what Bergsonism teaches us, and what common sense forces us not to forget. The present can only ever exist in any quantifiable measure as a memory, in which case it is imbued with attributes gleaned from the fanciful whims of subjective recollection (an object observed by many people five minutes ago is already undergoing an erosion of reality whereby the individual recollections of these many people have themselves trailed off into the unstable areas of perception, association and interpretation).

Öyvind Fahlström connected the semiotic schemata of Fluxus with the lexicon of popular culture in a way which has now become familiar within galleries and biennials: understanding the simple maxim that society and culture are in a perpetual symbiotic loop with one another and adjusting the linguistic framework of his art accordingly. Five decades later, Franck Scurti is doing much the same thing, albeit from a decidedly altermodernist perspective. Compare Fahlström’s appropriation of Robert Crumb’s Meatball cartoon for his 1969 sculptural assemblage Meatball Curtain (for R. Crumb) with Scurti’s hand-drawn comic insert for his 2002 exhibition at Switzerland’s Kunsthaus Baselland. Both employ the semiotic tactics of Marcel Broodthaers in their playful linguistic displacement. Consider 1974’s Les Animaux de la Ferme (The Farm Animals) : illustrations of multiple breeds of cow with their actual taxonomies replaced by car manufacturers. A tactic derived from Magritte, certainly, yet altogether more playful and with a more cynical eye. This is among Broodthaers’ more renowned pieces, and serves to throw the observer into a nonsensical black hole.

This practice is today lauded among the echelons of criticism, unlike in Fahlström’s time, which suffered from a modernist reactionary backlash. Franck Scurti enjoys higher praise from contemporary critics such as Nicolas Bourriaud:

It is through his writing that Scurti distinguishes himself among the great French artists of his generation, including Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster and Xavier Veilhan. Yet for all that he does not stand out because of a formal trademark, a formula that can be infinitely repeated. His “style,” if that term must be employed, lies rather in a movement toward assemblage, a personal phrasing, not in some visual code bar that is easily spotted among a thousand others. He seems to make it a point of honor (sic) never to repeat the same figures, even to change his working principle with each new show.

Scurti’s offbeat milieu is to direct idea into already-present social matter, to transmute the semantic drift of signs and apply a meaning that is certainly rhizomatic. For 2000’s video installation Colors, Scurti observed a football match between Ireland and France held in Dublin where various corporate sponsors had ill-advisedly painted their corporate logos upon the pitch. As the rain started to fall, the paint diluted and became tacky, covering the players in these corporate, interpellative primaries. There are several ways in which we can read this: one interpretation would be of a capitalist spillage, whereby the economic machine becomes jammed with its subjects; another reading would be the cross-cultural accident of a sporting event resembling an art “happening.” The following year, a gallery in Lyon was temporarily taken over by a clothing manufacturer making cheap t-shirts. Each day a different cartoon was printed on the shirts reflecting on the day’s practices. In 2013, Scurti put his own spin on Broodthaers’ series of mussel pots by filling a snakeskin suitcase with popcorn, while an interview given to Blouin Art (with the headline “Duchamp Prize Nominee Franck Scurti on Being an Artist Without a Style”) Scurti said “I really think that things are happening elsewhere today. Don’t you kind of feel as if you’ve seen everything? The phrasing is more important than the style, I believe.”

The artist without a style, while immediately striking the reader as a pejorative, is perhaps one of the more fundamental elements of nomadology. To forsake geographic restrictions, ontological categerisation or indeed to eschew any sedentary restrictions is to take full responsibility for one’s own freedom: to discard the State we must truly discard the State, and in this we cannot expect to retain a State-defined, repeatable identity.

Chapter Three: Harry Plays Go!

Line of Flight #4: In 1980, Peter Greenaway delivers The Falls, a feature-length absurdist narrative concerning the mysterious Violent Unknown Event (VUE). Formerly a student at Walthamstow College of Art, Greenaway then begins a film career which retains many of his art school traits. Throughout his career, Greenaway references his cultural background and persistently returns to the prosopopoeial character Tulse Luper, who lingers on the narrative edge of much of Greenaway’s films.

Line of Flight #5: Prior to his death in 1986, Harry Irene delivers a two-hour lecture which is itself essentially nomadological. Beginning with Irene singing the praises of Nam June Paik (much to the bewilderment of those in the audience who are familiar with Irene’s previous writings) and comparing the Korean’s work to that of Auguste Rodin. With a full appreciation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to his credit, Irene postulates that the smooth sculptures of Rodin have, Via Paik, been re-interpreted as striated and found a new smoothness in the artist’s appropriations of television sets and radios, and particularly focuses on Paik’s robotic assemblages:

The robot in this instance is nothing less than a self-contained monad. It is a haecceity as much as it is synecdoche – the thing is the body and the bodies form the thing. Perhaps our emerging media works best in unity, or perhaps the sum of its parts it entirely irrelevant. This is of no consequence given that our world is inescapably built of this technological fabric, as intransigent and unmoveable as Rodin’s marble.

Irene then goes on to postulate that the cinematic output of David Lynch proved the futility of Freudian interpretation, citing the director’s latest Blue Velvet as an attack on modern psychoanalysis because the entire film is bookended by the camera going both inside the human ear and passing out of the ear. Irene theorises that the film therefore only exists inside the subconscious and refuses to extricate itself from the same until it becomes convenient for the director to do so. Few present in the audience can see the logic in this, though they are more than satisfied that Irene has become that most miraculous of things: the State Machine which has become the War Machine. Typically the nomadic, eventually, becomes the sedentary. The War Machine becomes the State Machine as it attempts to preserve its own order. The champions of Abstract Expressionism eventually became its protectors – bulwarks against the oncoming storm of postmodernism. So for Harry Irene to become an exemplar of this phenomenon in reverse is something startlingly unique. Irene, a lifelong proponent of chess, and the occasional school champion of same, has recently taken up the game of Wei Chi. Whereas chess is fixed and rigid, Wei Chi (or Go, as is its Western nomenclature) is ever-expansive (infinite, even), observes a few simple rules and allows for a fluid competition. The game is only over when one or both players decide that enough is enough. One imagines that if Max von Sydow had challenged Death to Wei Chi rather than chess, the film would still be playing out today.

“Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function. “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant… But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.”

How can we take this passage and apply it to art practices? Key words such as “coded” and “Semiology” can here be read as hallmarks of a closed and distinct practice (i.e. that of painting), whereas in Go the authors describe a “springing up at any point,” and “movements not from one point to another…without aim or destination.” We can understand this last as being of the rhizome.

Deleuze and machinery are somewhat synonymous. The War Machine, the State Machine, etc. The State Machine is static and sedentary. We can look upon this is the machine of bureaucracy, that thing which has become fixed and immobile due to its own inability to expand and mutate – bureaucracy stunts growth, as it were. The State apparatus apportions and distributes territory and marks out borders. The War Machine, however, is subject to change. It plots its own territory according to its own arbitrations. It affects, is in a constant state of becoming and is by its very nature nomadic. The mirrored affect in contemporary art is primarily an intellectual one, in that the artist, when once would be disciplined and produce according to history and contemporary tutelage, now pays little mind to the historical regime of artistic discipline. Codings and de-codings no longer function in the same way, thanks also to the capitalist and – perhaps more so – neo-liberal paradigm shifts within our very language.

If we consider the social factors contributing to the late-Twentieth Century nomadological turn in art, then the most obvious event would be the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. Before this, countries were silenced – the suppression of artistic freedom was a la mode for a regime which allied itself with More’s Utopia. East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria had literally no presence on the global art scene whilst the Berlin Wall stood. Borders, both literal and metaphorical, were dropped overnight. That same year Centre Georges Pompidou hosted Magiciens de la Terre, billed as the world’s first truly global art exhibition, it sought to sought to correct the problem of “one hundred percent of exhibitions ignoring 80 percent of the earth.” It would be churlish to assume that these two were events were not connected: Communism is a literal State Machine, and its dissolution here literally gives was to the nomadic.

We shall conclude with a reverential mention of Michael Haneke’s 1997 TV film Das Schloß (The Castle), in which the director explicitly acknowledges Franz Kafka’s original, unfinished text . The film ends with sheer abruptness, as Kafka wrote (or, indeed did not write it), with K traipsing through the snow. He never gains entrance to the castle, nor is the bureaucracy in place to prevent this given any resolution. It is problematic to offer any absolute conclusion on the topic of nomadology, for it is both an ongoing phenomenon and, in many ways, has always been there on the horizon of our society and culture. If the fall of communism led to a nomadic rupture, then the same can be said for each time capitalism gives way under pressure. The War Machine exists on the border of the State, and can be said to be the very thing which applies pressure to the apparatus. Kafka is synonymous with the bureaucratic machine, so the novel’s abrupt ending – though technically an unfinished work – is the most profound way for it to finish. Haneke reflects on this, and pays homage to its nomadic nature by allowing his film to just…stop. I, in turn, pay homage to both Kafka and Haneke by following suit.